From ordinary to exceptional customer experience

Putting the “wow” into home services

For O2E Brands, delivering exceptional service means optimizing a complex B2B2C business model. Based out of Vancouver, Canada, the fast-growing home services group makes everyday tasks like junk removal, painting and house detailing easy for its customers. O2E has also helped over 250 entrepreneurs throughout North America and Australia become franchisees — realizing their dream of business ownership in an industry worth over $100 billion annually.

“The company has tripled in size since I joined six years ago,” said Michael Downing, Vice President, Business Operations at O2E Brands. “In order to sustain that growth, we needed to improve service quality and productivity. We were looking for scalability, improved experience and revenue growth.”

Detailed assessment

To achieve unlimited scalability and agility, O2E Brands knew it needed to migrate to the cloud with a modern contact center as a service solution. It validated the Genesys Cloud platform — drawn to its renowned ease of deployment. Through the trial, it became clear that use cases being delivered via the Genesys PureConnect on-premises solution could easily be achieved, and even exceeded, with the cloud platform.

“We measured performance, voice quality, agent experience and so on,” added Downing. “We even compared the amount of support cases and tickets we got. Since our agents were learning a new system you’d expect to see a peak, but it was actually lower than normal.”

Customer experience creativity

Meanwhile, the pandemic was tightening its grip. “COVID-19 was a big catalyst and we had to shift our entire workforce, including 250 sales advisors, to home working within five days,” added Downing. “That’s when the limitations of how we’d architected our old Genesys platform for office working became apparent — particularly when it came to factors like stability and uptime for remote working.”

Learning from the 30-day pilot helped the company accelerate the rollout of Genesys Cloud across all its brands, while also onboarding 50 agents from a new business unit that previously used a hosted cloud PBX system.

Leveraging workforce engagement

After a smooth migration from Genesys Interaction Optimizer to Genesys Workforce Engagement Management, the company began using the tool for ongoing improvement opportunities.

“We quickly realized our virtual contact center model was driving a better experience for our employees and customers,” said Ryan Webber, Manager, Workforce Management at O2E Brands. “Metrics, for the most part, were positive across the board. So we decided to explore how Genesys Workforce Engagement Management could drive further value.”

O2E Brands focused on optimizing two areas: agent occupancy and sales conversions. To maximize occupancy, the team relied on a combination of forecasting, scheduling and coaching — all managed from within the Genesys Workforce Engagement Management system.

“We took overall revenue goals, generated their volume targets and used AI-powered forecasting to predict the right balance between over- and understaffing,” added Webber.

Previously, coaching was being managed manually through spreadsheets with requests received via email and chat. Genesys Cloud gave supervisors a newfound ability to schedule coaching sessions directly in the tool, taking into account agent breaks and holidays.

“The more time supervisors and team leads spent on coaching, the more our agent occupancy rates increased,” said Webber. “We saw a 3.5% improvement plus a noticeable increase in sales, which was an expected byproduct.”

Powering faster innovation

Released from the burden of day-to-day management of its premises-based systems, O2E Brands can shift resources to more strategic activities — like uncovering unique ways Genesys Cloud can achieve untapped service potential and meet its business objectives.

“Our on-premises platform seemed like a barrier to roll out new channels,” said Downing. “It always felt like you needed a big business case and professional services. Now, we’re able to experiment with digital services and make calculated bets with a clear idea of how we’ll measure successful business outcomes.”

Along with developing an omnichannel strategy, one of those hedged bets is integrating Genesys Cloud with its CRM system, making better use of data to deliver a more personalized experience for B2B and B2C customers.

“Our agents are pretty excited about reducing average handle time and managing all their interactions from within Salesforce,” said Downing.

In staying with Genesys, O2E Brands considered its future roadmap and the faster deployment of new customer services.

“Cloud should be a continuous success story, not just one,” concluded Downing. “Now, every time there’s something new, we get to decide if it’s valuable or not, and if we want to turn it on.”